Loved pinballs since the 60's and always wanted to start a small collection. Recently bought my first pinny to "do up", It was an old Stern "Hot Hand" that I remembered from the lunch room of a company I worked in the 80's designing/repairing electrocardiogram systems....Anyway it was described on ebay as "good to excellent, only a couple of globes blown". I really had NO idea what old machines like this are worth (wish I had found this site first!) and paid a stupidly high price for it (considering its condition), physically its not too bad with wear and tear expected of its age. When I picked it up It was sitting outside and was told there was no power available to test it, stupidly I bought it anyway (Im rurual and had traveled some distance)....got it home and it was pretty much dead. Ive finally got it going, no cosmetic restoration other than a clean, I just wanted to play the thing. So far work has included....3 displays repaired (all had multiple blown resistors and driver transistors) the rectifier board was butchered so badly I gave up and scratch built one using tag board and vero-board, the lamp driver board was also butchered and took many hours to get working again. The MPU board was glitchy and several bypass caps and tantalums later it was working. Amazingly the nicad battery was perfect. Lots of switches were also badly pitted and some of the playfield globes had no holders and the wires directly soldered onto the globes!...I wonder what the chances are of having so many problems in the one unit?
The game actually plays quite well now, the only things left to do (Im not going to even try cosmetics like some of the brilliant jobs here) is the "knocker" thing is missing, Ive seen solenoids on ebay but the dont have anything attached to the plunger that would belt into the cabinet...would the "shaft"? be a seperate part???.....the only other thing (and Im hoping someone can tell the me the correct term/name for the part so I can try and buy one) is just above the flippers, there are "bumpers????" on each side, on the left hand side the acutator rod that comes from the solenoid and actually whacks into the rubber to bump the ball away is broken....If I cant buy the part I guess I'll have to try and fashion something up from scrap steel.......Anyway, I hope the next one I buy goes a bit smoother!
Cheers, Douggie
